[Kmymoney-devel] Yet another odd reconciliation problem

[Thomas Baumgart]

Hi,

On Tuesday 30 June 2015 20:23:55 Jack wrote:

> I have spent the past few days reconciling several investment accounts,
> which I have not done for several months, so I'm running into lots of
> issues.  Many I have written about in the past, and many are due to
> strange things that Merrill Lynch does when creating their OFX
> downloads, some being apparent differences between the OFX and their
> printed statements.  For now, I'll stick to things where I think KMM
> might be improved.  I've already opened one wishlist (be able to use
> the context menu to easily switch between ledger views of investment
> and brokerage accounts, even if the current transaction does not have
> any split in the other account.)
> 
> I'm probably going to file another wishlist that when filtering an
> investment account ledger display by a security name, that values be
> shown in the balance column.  I know this is not reasonably possible
> right now, since the filter is text based, and there is no way for the
> program to know it would be safe to show balances, since the display
> includes all transactions for the desired security.  However, I often
> want to see the history of transactions for a single security,
> including the number of shares held.  I suppose this would really be a
> new and different sort of filter from the current text based filter.
> 
> My current issue is with reconciliation.  Right now, on one particular
> account, when I try to complete the reconciliation, I get the message:
> "You are about to finish the reconciliation of this account with a
> difference between your bank statement and the transactions marked as
> cleared.  Are you sure you wish to finish the reconciliation?"  All the
> numbers and transactions I see displayed are completely consistent.  I
> am just guessing, but perhaps what KMM thinks is my bank statement
> balance is not what I think it is.  Where does the program get this
> number?  I suppose if it is the account balance from the most recent
> OFX import, it wouldn't match, since that includes transactions from
> this month, and I am now reconciling as of the end of the previous
> month.  However, if this is the problem, then any time a user has done
> an OFX import later than the date of reconciliation, this message is
> likely to be shown.  Am I on the right track here, or is there
> something I'm missing or apparently not aware of?

I just tried to use reconciliation on an investment account for the very first 
time and found out, that it might not work. The original was written with 
cash/bank accounts in mind.

Here's what I found in KEndingBalanceDlg::slotUpdateBalances()

  // determine the beginning balance and ending balance based on the following
  // forumulas:
  //
  // end balance   = current balance - sum(all non cleared transactions)
  //                                 - sum(all cleared transactions posted
  //                                        after statement date)
  // start balance = end balance - sum(all cleared transactions
  //                                        up to statement date)


To get some more information what is going on in this section of the code, you 
can build KMyMoney with the build type set to 'DebugFull'. Use e.g. ccmake to 
change it if necessary.

This will present you a menu option called 'Tools/Debug traces'. If you turn 
it on, KMyMoney prints some trace information on the command line which shows 
what it is doing during the reconciliation process. Some other areas will 
provide information as well.



The starting balance is the sum of all previously reconciled transactions 
(either marked manually or by the reconciliation wizard). The ending balance 
is the sum of all transactions up to the statement date entered in the wizard. 
Make sure this date matches your paper statement and not the download. 
Transactions having a post date past this statement date are not considered 
during the reconciliation process.

The actual calculation is a bit different (see above) but the resulting 
numbers should be the same.

In case the starting balance does not match, there is a problem somewhere in 
the recorded data.

> Thanks for any explanations.

So much for now. In case you have more questions or spot some weirdness in the 
traces please let us know.

-- 

Regards

Thomas Baumgart

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